Starship Bridge Battles

Morrus said:

I have no idea. I'm struggling with the exact same thing. I'm not 100% convinced it can be done, but I'll continue trying.

Right now, I'm just leaning towards a ship each. That I do find enjoyable.

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that's fair.

My brainstorm was an attempt to sort of map the Artemis experience to a table-top game.

Probably one part of the reason Artemis works is that everybody playing is familiar with Star Trek and has envisioned being on the bridge. Basically, they want to be there.

If your players don't want to be there, then they won't get into the roles, which is half the point.

Janx said:

that's fair.

My brainstorm was an attempt to sort of map the Artemis experience to a table-top game.

Probably one part of the reason Artemis works is that everybody playing is familiar with Star Trek and has envisioned being on the bridge. Basically, they want to be there.

If your players don't want to be there, then they won't get into the roles, which is half the point.

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Yeah, those are my thoughts as well regarding my posts. I certainly think something better could be done, and perhaps completely reinventing the wheel to something altogether different, along Morrus's thinking - but I don't know what that would be. Within the framework of starship bridge experiences from popular sci-fi movies and television series the traditional bridge officer mentality is well defined. Perhaps Morrus could come up with something completely different, but it would b a different take on sci-fi starship operations, and not really fit existing concepts on what bridge operations mean with most publications or films on the subject.

gamerprinter said:

Perhaps Morrus could come up with something completely different, but it would b a different take on sci-fi starship operations, and not really fit existing concepts on what bridge operations mean that most publications or films on the subject.

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Not really. Different mechanics don't mean different fiction.

Morrus said:

Not really. Different mechanics don't mean different fiction.

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No, but you mentioned something about each player operating his own ship in an earlier post. Short of operating starfighters on a larger "aircraft carrier" capable interstellar frigate, most games fit in concepts like the crew of the Serenity - there is no normal capability for individually piloted ships in circumstances like that. If you shoehorned starship combat as operating as distinct individual player operations, it would break from the storyline. Perhaps I misunderstood what you meant specifically regarding your mentioned post. I'm just trying to wrap my head around individual player combat for space combat and still fit the stories I'd like to replicate - with how you put it...

gamerprinter said:

No, but you mentioned something about each player operating his own ship in an earlier post.

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Well, yeah, but that's not a new way to do things. Every starship combat game ever made has let you do that! I'd be pretty off-base trying to take any credit for it!

Maybe, I've just never seen mechanics or starship operations that do so individually for each player, when usually there's only a single ship the entire party is aboard (I don't know how that would work) - it seems outside where many sci-fi stories go. Again, I might be completely misunderstanding what you mean, and why I'm not getting it. Note I haven't played every sci-fi RPG, so I might just be limited on what to compare to - I've played Traveler, Space Opera, Star Frontiers and Eclipse Phase. Except for the last one, which I haven't played at all, those other systems were run back in the 1980's so has been a looong time since I run such games to even remember all their mechanical options.

I think that the standard turn-based mechanics of RPGs are a notable barrier.

I can think of two ways to get around that, without eliminating the turn-based aspect. One, however, is a far bigger design challenge, and is notably disjointed from the usual RPG paradigms - it might make a good game on its own, but may be unsuitable for integration to an RPG.

The other, however, is at least conceptually easily available. Combat roles, 4e-style. Possibly including something like the AEDU structure (if you have a skill-based system, instead of level-based, your powers or feats come from having some amount of a skill, and as you increase in skill, you get more and newer abilities.)

The analogy seems pretty natural. While, for many, the Striker, Defender, Leader, Controller structure seemed rather artificial for a fantasy character, the "tactical battle station" is an explicitly stated, and generally accepted role in spaceship combat. You might even do a fairly explicit mapping - Weapons are Striker, Shields are Defender, Sensors are Controller (consider casting false sensor images for control, f'rex) and the captain is the leader. Engineering and Sciences may be "jack of all trades" or other special maneuvers that don't otherwise fit - more like a bard than anything else. You need to squeeze in the Navigator/Pilot, but you get the idea...

If you step away from "roll a die for a skill check for a small effect or piece of information" and move more towards "I have powers that effect the ship and the battlefield" you may be able to evoke the tactical fun many folks did have with 4e. Now, the sensor guy doesn't just roll a die and scan, and the GM gives him an answer. He uses a power, that puts something like a Mark on a target, and so on.

One issue might be that Star Trek battles are very limited. Simulating Star Trek instead of BSG, for example, would feel very different. If you're playing BSG, then a player can control squadrons of launched fighters, which really is a whole independent job on its own, but that's not common in a Star Trek setup.

So I guess it depends how narrowly you want to define it. I'd suggest that the Star Trek bridge setup is possibly the most difficult one to make fun. As for Firefly, most of the cast just buckles down and waits for Wash to finish flying when starship combat ensues! Though there was that one episode where Jayne sat on the hull with his rifle.

Umbran said:

If you step away from "roll a die for a skill check for a small effect or piece of information" and move more towards "I have powers that effect the ship and the battlefield" you may be able to evoke the tactical fun many folks did have with 4e. Now, the sensor guy doesn't just roll a die and scan, and the GM gives him an answer. He uses a power, that puts something like a Mark on a target, and so on.

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I've given thoughts on pursuing this direction as well. The two issues that come to mind are, if you were building a sci-fi system that highly integrated ship board operations with game play, you might have to include class features for a given PC class that accomodates such mechanics - thus needing to revamp every PC class that might be a ship's officer to include such aspects (a lot of work). The second would be making the entire ship's combat activity a subsystem, even a separate mini-game of its own from main system mechanics, though that might be disjointing to normal play. However, I'd think this concept should work if developed right - I just don't know what that would be...

As an aside, I wouldn't really want to play a truly Firefly starship game, rather something closer to Millenium Falcon style game, where you have at least pilot, copilot/engineer, and gunnery officers. I want to have space combat with weapon systems, not evasive maneuvers of an unarmed trader. While I would want plenty of instances of standard on-planet scenarios like a typical RPG, but in a sci-fi game, I'd definitely also want 3D space combat to be a good part of such a game.

That depends on your paradigm, I suppose.

Fighter squadons can be handled as a individual ships, as grouped units, or as abstract effects, depending on the power differences between those fighters and the capital ships.

Star Trek does have a general lack of fighter-type ships. They come up only here or there in the canon. But, in BSG, the fighters are great cinematics, but for the most part the individual ships don't matter. They have an effect in aggregate, and their individual detailed motions really don't matter.

Star Wars games typically handle this by having different scales - there's a human scale, a fighter scale, and a capital ship scale. Weapons created for one scale are often not very useful on other scales. Yes, if you put a wookie on the wrong end of a Star Destroyer turret, you're going to have vapor and fur left afterwards, but trying to hit that small a target just doesn't work well, and so on.